by S Block
‘When this war is over . . .’ he told her, his face just a few inches from hers, ‘I will spend all the seconds of my life with you. I knew this the moment we met, when I looked down at you on the ground.’
Pat’s eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and she was able to pick out the features of his face she had imprinted on her mind during his absence.
‘I felt the same,’ she said.
‘This is why we must trust one another to endure periods of silence,’ Marek said. ‘I am going to be doing things I cannot tell you about. Activity for the war. I will be thinking about you. You must believe it.’
‘I do.’
‘You must endure with Bob. Carve out a life here until I return. There is nowhere else as safe that I could put you. Surviving Bob is your war, Patricia.’
Pat nodded and they kissed. She knew it was time for Marek to leave.
‘I will write when I return,’ he said. ‘Until then, do not worry.’ He smiled. ‘Save your tears for Nazis who cross my path.’
Pat didn’t want to let him go. Nor did she want his last memory of her to be of her losing control and breaking down.
Be strong – if only until he’s gone.
They kissed once more and stood holding one another for five minutes in complete silence, breathing in time, kissing intermittently. Marek finally kissed Pat for the last time, and said, ‘I love you so, so much, Patricia.’ He slicked back his hair, put his cap on low over his eyes, pulled his collar up around his face, looked at her for a few moments, then hurried away. Within seconds he was enveloped by the night and it was as if he was never there. For a moment Pat stood quite still, as if she had just seen a ghost.
From the very first moment they had literally bumped into one another outside the Black Horse six months earlier, Marek had demonstrated an ability to reassure Pat that everything in her life would eventually be all right. Calmness and strength radiated from him. Grace and intelligence, too. She didn’t know how he did it, but his presence was entirely consoling. Standing beneath the bridge she felt more at peace than she had for weeks.
Only once Marek’s footsteps had dwindled into silence did Pat feel tears prick her eyes. She let them slowly roll down her cheeks as she set out briskly for Joyce’s house, allowing the rain to mingle with them as soon as they emerged. Pat could walk past anyone in the village, even Bob, and they wouldn’t know she was crying her heart out. As she walked, she had only one thought, for Marek and herself.
Be strong. Fight your war. Survive. Survive.
Chapter 3
SEATED ON A hill looking down at the small village of Great Paxford, the church of St Mark’s witnessed its largest attendance for a funeral for many years. In recent times, other funeral services had been respectably attended. But none had drawn the entire population of the village, in addition to many from the surrounding area. If there were empty spaces among the pews for the funeral of Will Campbell it was because large numbers of men had gone to war. Even then, on hearing the news of his death, many of those had written to Erica from barracks about how much they thought of Will. He was deeply loved and admired.
All present looked keenly at his wife Erica, now a widow at just forty-three. Her face seemed ghostly pale atop her black dress, and her small, bloodless hands gripped the gilded sides of the lectern so tightly that her daughters sat ready to dash from the front row and catch her if she collapsed. Having already eulogised her husband for several minutes, Erica found herself momentarily overwhelmed, and ground to a halt. She felt every eye upon her and closed her own to gather her thoughts. Finally, she opened her eyes, cleared her throat, and continued.
‘Will always knew his limitations.’ Her voice was weak from emotional exhaustion, yet strong with conviction. A voice refusing to be silenced by grief. ‘Whether imposed by limitations of current medical practice, or his own knowledge and experience, Will never promised his patients more than he could deliver. He always did his utmost to offer hope that health would improve, but never fell into easy promises or guarantees. For Will, healthcare was a partnership between patient and doctor – he would do his very best for his patients but never left them in doubt that they had to follow his advice and not fall back on the old remedies and tonics that weren’t founded on scientific principle. At the beginning of our life in Great Paxford, this made him uncompromising to some. But in time everyone came to respect Will for his determination and care. And to trust him with their lives.’
Erica looked at the familiar, strained, mournful faces seated before her, and struggled to maintain her composure. She could scarcely bring herself to look at Will’s simple wooden coffin before her. She glanced down at the notes she had made to keep herself focused.
‘Everyone here was a patient of Will’s. But you were also his friends. That’s how he thought of you – patients first, always. But also, his dear friends. If that hadn’t been the case, he – we – would never have settled so completely into this village. This was where he – and we – felt at home. For that Will was – we both are – enormously grateful to you all.’
Erica looked at her daughters, Kate and Laura, sitting in the front row. They were willing her to maintain her composure and get through what they knew would be a terrible, once-in-a-lifetime ordeal. They had every confidence she could do it. Tears drenched Laura’s face. Yet having already buried a husband at only nineteen years of age, Kate had experience of managing raw emotion in public, and held back her own tears to spill later, in private.
Laura pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. She had become gripped by a terror that she might forget what her father looked like, that all her memories of him would fade and all she would be left with were stilted photographs that failed to capture Will’s warmth and spirit and made him look dead, but with his eyes open. Burying her face in the handkerchief, Laura brought forth an image of her father, and began the process of burning it into her mind forever.
The image she conjured up was of Will during his last weeks, on one of their ‘walks’ around the village where Laura pushed him up and down the lanes so he could enjoy the glowing autumnal sunlight of his last days. His face was terribly thin. He wore a thick red woollen cap to keep his head warm, and a large woollen picnic blanket was draped over his depleted arms, body, and legs. Laura told him he looked like a ‘Guy’ she was wheeling round the streets before bonfire night. By then, the effort of speaking was proving exhausting for her father. His thin croak usually trailed off before he reached the end of any sentence he was trying to convey.
But on this occasion, he appeared determined to express himself and be understood by his daughter. Small, puffy bursts of breath threw out syllables that Laura had to catch and thread together like beads on a string.
‘You . . .’ he said, and then looked at her as if he expected her to understand the rest of the sentence without him having to speak. When Laura looked back at him, puzzled, Will tried to continue. He stared at her and forced his jaw open to say something else. ‘Good . . .’ he finally said.
‘Me good?’ Laura asked.
Will nodded.
‘Me good?’
Will stared at her. Laura could see his cheek muscles flexing beneath his skin, trying to open his jaw for another attempt at speech.
‘You good . . . doc . . .’ he said. Laura’s confused expression forced Will to make one final effort. He gripped the arms of his wheelchair and braced himself, as if getting out these words would take all his remaining energy. ‘Yougooddoctor . . .!’ he spluttered.
Laura repeated what she believed her father had said back to him, and looked at Will for confirmation: that she would make a good doctor. She asked him to confirm that was what he had said. But he could not. His breath had shortened and he was struggling to breathe. He looked back with an intensity she had never seen before. But was it ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to her question? He couldn’t say.
It was the coherent version of her father Laura now brought to mind in t
he front row of St Mark’s. She pictured him smiling at her from within the casket.
‘Well?’ Laura imagined him asking, ‘have you given any thought to my suggestion?’
‘Are you suggesting I shouldn’t feel miserable above all else?’ Laura heard herself reply.
‘No, no. Of course not. But I don’t want the sadness to permanently immobilise you, Laura. I want it to act as a spur in your life, even as we find ourselves at the end of mine.’
‘I have given it some thought,’ Laura said.
‘Good,’ she heard her father’s voice reply.
‘I’ve been trying to clarify whether you actually said what I thought you did, or whether I was imagining it?’
‘What do you think I said?’
‘Did you say – because it was difficult to make out since your breathing wasn’t very good and you were all over the place towards the end – did you really say I should be a doctor?’
‘Is that what you heard?’
‘It’s what I thought I heard.’
‘Did you ask me for clarification at the time?’
‘I did.’
‘And what did I say?’
‘Your breathing became very laboured and you mumbled something I couldn’t really understand. Your head looked very precarious on top of your neck. You were so thin.’
‘So, what do you think I said by way of clarification?’
‘I don’t know. I’m making up this entire conversation. Is any of it really true? Did you really say I should become a doctor? Or did I mis-hear you, and all of this is simply me trying to convince myself into believing something I would like to be true?’
‘Would you like to become a doctor?’
‘I haven’t given my future much thought, to be honest.’
‘Perhaps you should.’
Laura looked at the coffin, wishing more than anything that he could still talk to her. But even within her own head her father had fallen silent.
Laura considered it indisputable that since she had been cashiered from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force her life had lacked much forward momentum. She had joined the Observation Corps, but more as a way to make some form of contribution to the war effort than an activity with any long-term ambition. For a period, she had thrown herself into spending every last moment with her father, to generate as many memories with him as possible. But with him gone she felt utterly adrift. She didn’t know what she wanted from the rest of her life. His final, confusing words to her simply bounced around her mind like a diminishing echo. Her life felt frozen, while everyone else inched forward.
Look at Kate. Kate hasn’t wasted any time since losing Jack. Training to be a nurse and building a new life for herself. Perhaps Dad was simply making an innocent association in his head. One daughter a nurse, so could the other be . . . a doctor? Or was he was just rambling . . .?
Laura watched her mother return to her seat. Reverend James stood and deferentially nodded his head at Erica as she walked past, then took up his position behind the lectern.
Laura looked beyond Kate, at Dr Rosen, the locum GP who’d taken over Will’s surgery after he became unable to work.
That’s what a doctor looks like. I don’t look anything like as clever as that.
Laura felt her mother take her hand and squeeze tightly. She glanced at Erica’s make-up, done ‘for Will’s sake’, her mother had said. It scarcely masked the deep rings beneath her eyes. Laura could see that Erica sat with her chin set, jaw clenched. She knew her mother would want to bury her father with the utmost dignity.
‘No tears, girls.’
Laura rested her free hand on top of Erica’s and gave it a gentle squeeze of love and admiration.
Laura tuned back into the service and heard Reverend James make a clunky reference to the Pauline epistle to the Colossians, in which Paul wrote about the apostle, Luke, the physician who had ‘medicines for the souls’. Reverend James proceeded to make a tortuous analogy between the apostle and Will’s life work, claiming that in healing the physical body Will also healed the spirits of patients troubled by illness. Erica turned her head and whispered softly into Laura’s ear.
‘Dad would hate this.’
Laura nodded, and looked at the coffin. Its occupant remained silent.
It suddenly hit Laura that her father was soon to disappear into the ground forever. Not only for the foreseeable future, but for the dark, terrifyingly unforeseeable future, too. Not just for a bit of it. For the unimaginable all of it. And once he was buried and covered up, and the earth patted down flat so as not to look like anyone or anything was buried at all, the business of the world would rush in and fill the empty space where Will once was, and it would be as if he had never existed. Laura felt her throat fill with inconsolable, choking misery, and squeezed her eyes as tightly as she could to prevent a single molecule of water from escaping between their lids.
*
Steph Farrow sat next to her sixteen-year-old son, Stanley, at the very back of the church, yet still felt conspicuous and self-conscious. It had been just under a week since she had stood at the kitchen sink and watched Stanley run screaming for his life along the far field. Just under a week since she snatched the shotgun from the cupboard in the hall, and burst out of the farmhouse to save him. Just under a week since she had aimed the gun at the German pilot’s back and pulled the trigger and watched him flop dead and bloody on top of her son.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it, not even in church, saying farewell to the man who had delivered her son.
The pilot’s face haunted her, even in sleep. She’d woken with a gasp every night since, jolted into consciousness by his eyes boring into her like two tiny blue lamps switched off. There was no escaping him.
It had taken about ten minutes for Steph and Stanley to come to their senses after she fired the lethal shot. Stanley bubbled over with euphoria that his life had been saved. Steph’s reaction was the opposite. She began to justify what she had just done. She relived the nightmare over and over again.
‘He was trying to kill you,’ she told Little Stan, almost as if he hadn’t been involved. ‘He was beating you. He’d chased you across the field with his pistol, shouting at you that he was going to kill you.’
Stanley didn’t understand Steph’s need to justify anything.
‘You killed a Nazi! You killed one of the bastards!’
In her recollection of the episode, it was always herself, Stanley, and the German pilot. Though their farmhand, Isobel, had been present on the farm at the time, she never featured in Steph’s memories of the actual shooting.
Something had begun to bother her. If the pilot had wanted to seriously hurt or kill Stanley, he’d plenty of opportunity. Why hadn’t he fired when he’d chased Stanley? Why hadn’t he shot him when he had the upper hand on the ground? She’d picked up his revolver and found a full chamber of bullets. The German had the means to kill Stanley six times over, so why was her son still alive?
Little Stan had wanted to telephone the police straight away, and spread news that the terror gripping Great Paxford for the past four days had been brought to an end. Steph’s immediate reaction was that she didn’t want the authorities involved. Like many working country-folk, Steph had a natural aversion to the police, whose services they almost never required.
‘How can we not call them?’ asked Stanley. ‘He’s dead.’
Steph’s mind raced, ideas coming thick and fast.
‘No one knows he was here. Why don’t we just . . . bury him? Somewhere on the farm where no one would ever know. Or take him somewhere more remote and do it there.’
Stanley stared at his mother with disbelief. This was the most exciting event in his life, even more exciting than the war because it was so close to him, and his mother was trying to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it never happened.
‘If we don’t tell them people will still think he’s out there, somewhere, waiting to attack them, or blow something up.�
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Stanley’s imagination usually reached for the most lurid version of any given scenario. Steph wasn’t to be diverted from her preferred course of action.
‘Then we could dump the body where it’d be found,’ Steph replied. ‘That’d put an end to it.’
Stanley was bemused that his mother didn’t see the situation as clearly as he did.
‘Ma – he’s got a bloody great hole in his back! As soon as they found him all the questions would start about who did it?’
‘But why would they think of us?’ Steph asked.
‘I don’t know how the police work,’ Stanley said. ‘But they’d start snooping around, trying to find out who killed him. We’d all be questioned. We’d have to lie and I’m no good at that.’
This was undoubtedly true. Whenever he lied his cheeks and ears glowed bright red, and his voice became strained as his resolve to brazen it out crumbled. Ever since he was little, Stanley (also known as ‘Little Stan’ to differentiate from his father, Stan) had no choice but to tell the truth at all times, and he became known for his honesty.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘we’ve nothing to hide. So why hide or bury him? Why not just tell everyone we got the Nazi bugger? They’d be relieved. You saved everyone, Ma! Why shouldn’t we say?!’
The church choir and congregation began to tear into ‘Abide With Me’, its familiar melody and stirring lyric pulling Steph back into the present.
We have nothing to hide. Except I killed a man believing he was killing my son. I panicked. Believing something isn’t enough to take a life, is it? Even a Nazi’s.
Steph stared at the crucifix suspended above the altar, and tried to sing along with the hymn. After a few moments, she gave up. The words were irretrievable from the fog inside her head. She was back in the field with the shotgun, then telephoning the police, trying her best to sound matter of fact. But when the moment came to say, ‘I’ve killed the German pilot,’ instead she said, ‘I’ve got the German pilot.’ It took a minute and a half for the operator to be clear what Steph was trying to tell her.